A small northern New Mexico village now shares its name with a 5-mile-wide asteroid crater on Mars.
The International Astronomical Union recently named the Martian crater for the village of Chupadero, which sits at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
The name was provided by Brad...

The Opportunity rover is stuck in a sand dune.
This occurred on the 24th April, (only now being reported in the media.)
The MER team is hopeful that they can extract the rover from the sand dune and continue with the mission.

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took movies of t​wo dust devils on Mars. The movie clips show dust ​devils scooting across the ground inside Gusev Cra​ter on Mars as seen from Spirit's hillside vantage​ point.
[url=http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1​13333main_1114050279_5705-1_dd_enh...

By using new, high spatial resolution infrared data from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, Victoria Hamilton from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Philip Christensen from Arizona State University have concluded that a region on the surface of Mars known to contain olivine-rich rocks...

New findings show the planet is more complex and active than previously believed - at least in certain places.
Finding those places, however, turns out to be trickier than just looking at landforms like river valleys or lakebeds or searching for specific minerals.
"Context is everythin...

A scientist believes techniques used to find oil and gas in the North Sea could help establish whether life could survive on Mars.
Professor John Parnell, from Aberdeen University, has been studying the Haughton meteor crater using methods for detecting oil and gas underground.
He was part of...

Martian surface morphology records a complex, changeable geologic history that suggests the planet may have been more hospitable to life during its early history. While the present atmosphere is predominantly CO2 and only about 1% of the density of Earth's atmosphere, but robot...

The Mars Express spacecraft has deployed the first of three booms that comprise its Marsis radar, which is to look for water within the Red Planet. At 1430 GMT on 4th May, a command was sent to release the boom, which forms one half of Marsis' primary antenna. The primary antenna's second boom is now due...

Google has just launched a new service called "Google Mars" that lets you browse the martian land just as you would with Google Maps.
Google has included three different types of data in Google Mars.
* Elevation - A shaded relief map, generated with data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter...

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains. The Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present.
[img]http:...

A dust devil spins across the surface of Gusev Crater just before noon on Mars. NASA's Spirit rover took the series of images in this spectacular 21-frame animation with its navigation camera on the rover's Martian day, or sol, 486 (March 15, 2005).
[img]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ima...

Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes.
It is 434 km in diameter, almost 19 km high, and the summit caldera is 115 miles wide. For comparison, the largest volcano on Earth is Mauna Loa. From its base on the sea floor, Mauna Loa measures only 10 km high and 120 km in dia...

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show a patch of water ice sitting on the floor of an unnamed crater near the Martian north pole.
The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 1343 with a ground resolution of approximate...

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show a large depression called Iani Chaos and the upper reaches of a large outflow channel called Ares Vallis.
Image strips were taken in October 2004, during three orbits from...

Observations made with the European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express satellite have spotted Martian Auroras.
Charged particles from the Sun interact with the Martian atmosphere and the weak magnetic field, and create glowing rings (aurora) around the poles.
"...

The streak of light that the Spirit rover photographed on Mars was likely part of a Martian meteor shower, scientists announced today.
The picture is the first of a shooting star above Mars.
Further, the flash has been traced back to its parent comet. And now astronomers figure they should be a...

A new study of old rocks on Earth could force a revision of theories about Mars. The results suggest ancient Mars might have been more magnetic than thought, challenging basic assumptions about the evolution of the red planet.
Data from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft have revealed a pattern...

An interdisciplinary team of scientists thinks it has an answer to a long-standing mystery of why the permanent icecap on Mars' South Pole is offset from the pole itself. Simply put, it's colder and stormier in that hemisphere.
But that is only part of the equation, scientists say, and new under...

A breathtaking panorama of Mars from Larry's Lookout. The lookout occurs near the peak of Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills.
The summit of Husband Hill is visible 200 metres in the distance toward the centre of the 360-degree near-true-colour picture.
[img]http://antwrp...

A portion of an exposure of bedrock dubbed "Larry's Outcrop" shows little layering in this view, in contrast ​to nearby outcrops called "Methuselah" and "Jibsheet."
[img]http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/pre​ss/spirit/20050524a/SS13_Larrys_FalseColor-...

Biblis Patera
These images, taken by the High Res​olution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars E​xpress spacecraft, show the Biblis Patera volcano, located in the western part of the Tharsis rise on [url=http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/blobr​ana/database/mars.ht...

For those who aren't interested in going "where no man has gone before," there are some interesting alternatives here on Earth.
Chris Jones of Red Planet Expeditions is planning "an immersion resort" between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. People will don space suits and work in a Ma...

Earth's closest neighbour, Mars, has always intrigued scientists, who now believe that humans could be living and working on the planet within the next 20 years.
To prepare for that possibility, NASA has set up a simulated Mars base - in the desert in the Western state of Utah.
[img]ht...

Mars Science Laboratory is repeating a highly successful process performed for the Mars Exploration Rovers, in which the entire scientific community -- not just the mission's science team -- has been offered the opportunity to provide input into the selection of the landing site. This process is...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped this picture​ of Mars on October 28, within a day of its closes​t approach to Earth on the night of October 29.
​
[url=http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/3​4/images/a/fo...

As the first rays of summer sunshine glint off the frosted surface of Mars, scientists in California are preparing an ambitious search effort to locate a spacecraft that went missing there as it prepared to land six years ago.
If all goes according to plan, the carbon dioxide frost over the martian...

The Russian federal space agency will display a full-scale Martian station at the Paris Air Show, which opens to the public on June 17, in Le Bourget, France.
"The station is small enough, but like the remote Earth sensing unmanned aircraft from Lavochkin NPO, it will be full-scale,"
...

MIT engineers and scientist colleagues have a new vision for the future of Mars exploration: a swarm of probes, each the size of a baseball, spreading out across the planet in every direction.
Thousands of probes, powered by fuel cells, could cover a vast area now beyond the reach of today's rove...

Tharsis region
This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows a suite of troughs in the Tharsis region that were also the site of some catastrophic floods. These features are located northwest of the volcano, Jovis Tholus.
[img]http://www.msss.c...

Images of "Victoria Crater" in Mars' Meridiani Planum region, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, provided detailed, three-dimensional information that was used to create this animation of a hypothetica...

A close-up look at Mars up close through the lens of a high resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The views of gullies, craters and ice layers are truly remarkable. JPL Video: Mars - A Feast for the Eyes Click to Play | View Details

This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the outlet channel of the Uzboi Vallis system into Crater Holden, in the region of Noachis Terra, centred at about 26º South and 325º East, on Mars.
The deepest parts...

Plumes of methane identified on Mars More than four years after researchers first said​ they had found methane gas on Mars, a scientist c​laims that he has "nailed" the controver​sial detection and identified key sources of the g​as. [url=http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081021/f​ull...

Volunteers wanted for simulated 520-day Mars mission Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychologi...

DLR simulates Mars' atmosphere in Göttingen Is the Earth the only place in our Solar System on which living organisms exist? Is there, for example, life on Mars? The goal of the European space mission ExoMars is to resolve this question. To this end, the atmosphere on Mars is being simulated at the Ger...

This video provides zoom and pan moves to emphasise the context and features of a Martian valley named Athabasca Valles, perhaps the youngest outflow channel on Mars. The detailed view comes from an image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Recon...

This video uses three-dimensional modelling of a gullied crater in the Centauri Montes region of Mars and simulates a flight over that landscape. One gully inside the crater has a deposit of light-toned material that was not present in 1999 but appeared by 2004, as determined from before-and-afte...

A monkey may be sent to Mars, under plans unveiled by Russian scientists. Although the ape will be looked after by a robot on the mission, the decision is expected to spark controversy with animal rights groups. The Russians first succeeded in putting monkeys into orbit in 1983. [url=http://www.te...

Tentative identification of the Mars Polar Lander crash site: Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander, after a NASA software blunder, the Mars Global Surveyor MOC was employed to acquire dozens of 1.5 m/pixel images of the landing zone ellipses. It looked for any evidence of the lander and its fa...

ESA and NASA are inviting scientists from across the world to propose instruments for their joint Mars mission, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Scheduled for launch in 2016, the spacecraft will focus on understanding the rarest constituents of the martian atmosphere, including the mysterious me...

On May 19, 1971, the Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 unmanned lander and orbiter. The Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions consisted of identical spacecraft, each with an orbiter and an attached lander; they were the first human artifacts to impact the surface of Mars. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Mars's mysterious elongated crater Orcus Patera on Mars Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression near Mars's equator, in the eastern hemisphere of the planet. Located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, its formation remains a mystery. Often overlooked, this well...

Endeavour is an impact crater located in Meridiani Planum on Mars. Endeavour is 22 kilometres in diameter. Using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data, phyllosilicate-bearing outcrops have been detected along the rim of this crater. These minerals may have formed under wet conditions in a low-acid...

Martian clouds in motion The images that compose this animation were taken on October 14, 2010, on Mars Express' 8676th orbit, and show an area within Noachis Terra to the west of Hellas basin, around 45 degrees south, 38 east. There are two c...

Mars Express observes clusters of recent craters in Ares VallisOraibi crater in Ares Vallis Newly released images taken by ESA's Mars Express show an unusual accumulation of young craters in the large outflow channel called Ares Vallis. Older craters have been reduced to ghostly outlines by the s...

New Martian Meteorite 3-D Video This is a 91.3 gram, 100% crusted individual from the July, 2011 Martian meteorite fall in Morocco. A meteorite fall that occurred in July 2011 near Foumzgit in the Tata region of Morocco. The fireball was wi...

Although I'm a purest for a clean light transmission through a telescope i'm also a big fan of filters. Filters can have a large and real effect on your observations. Mars appears as a tiny red/orange disk even in large telescopes so filter colour, light transmission, telescope magnification, and...

Some hardy Earth microbes could survive long enough on Mars to complicate the search for alien life, according to a new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers.
Though scientists looking for life on Mars worry about contamination from stowaway spores clinging to spacecraft, th...